This was an idea (that has been buried in another thread on here I am sure) but the general idea is to provide internet access to everyone around the world.

A Look At Project Loon’s Status, Courtesy of Nat & Lo

Some of our readers may be familiar with Nat and Lo, two Googlers who like to make videos of things within the company that strike their fancy. They call this their “20% Project”, a project that Googlers work on in their spare time to promote their beliefs and interests. They put out videos fairly frequently showing the inner workings of Google and its various projects. This week’s pick was Project Loon. Though not exactly shrouded in mystery, nobody had taken it upon themselves to ask the right questions and explain Project Loon to the common man like Nat and Lo have in this video until now. This is just one of many of Google’s moonshot projects, but it’s definitely one of the more important ones.
As a brief introduction to get anybody up to speed who may not already know about Project Loon, Google is using specially engineered giant balloons, designed to float twice as high as airplanes, to transport what are essentially giant cell towers through the air. The goal is to provide internet to the entire world; whether you’re on a farm in the middle of nowhere, in the tribal forests of Africa or on the top of a mountain, Project Loon aims to enable you to get online. According to Nat and Lo’s video, this has so far been accomplished to some extent in testing.
The biggest problem thus far is the balloons leaking or popping under stress, with the longest-lived balloon so far sitting at an impressive 187 days, thanks to the efforts of a dedicated “Leak Squad”, who put the balloons through extensive stress testing that simulates stratospheric conditions, as well as asking manufacturer employees who walk on top of balloons during their making to wear fluffier socks. During pressure and condition tests, balloons are routinely checked for strength at certain pressure intervals, then taken to the limit and purposely burst, at which point the tears are examined using special equipment to see things like what may have caused them, what direction the pop started in and how much pressure was focused on that spot.
While the longevity of the balloons and a few other factors are fine-tuned, testing is set to go live in more locations such as rural Indonesia, with some FCC filings even hinting at more testing on U.S. soil, which could eventually spell the end of deadzones where even satellite internet is barely feasible. As of now, there’s no real proposed timeframe to move Loon out of the testing phase, but with things going swimmingly thus far, it should only be a matter of time before everybody from Uncle Joe in Oklahoma to every village elder in Africa has internet access, helping to bring world culture and economic diversity to anybody who wants it.

Project Loon balloons travel approximately 20 km above the Earth’s surface in the stratosphere. Winds in the stratosphere are stratified, and each layer of wind varies in speed and direction. Project Loon uses software algorithms to determine where its balloons need to go, then moves each one into a layer of wind blowing in the right direction. By moving with the wind, the balloons can be arranged to form one large communications network.

Google’s Project Loon is an ambitious plan to float internet into the life of anyone who is currently without. But after a series of setbacks, the service is finally going to be tested by carriers this year.

Re/code reports from the annual TED conference in Vancouver that the project has come out the other side of a troubled stage stronger than before. With tweaks to the design, the balloons can now be made more cheaply but still navigate accurately—in fact, one balloon is said to have travelled around the world 19 times in 187 days last year.
Carriers have been involved with the project for a while, though the system has never been tested properly on consumer networks. Now at a stage where it can provide a 15 Mbps connection, Google is partnering with carriers in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and beyond and it hopes to test the aerial networks in anger with these real-life carriers some time this year.

Google’s Project Loon is based around using balloons carrying networking equipment to be floated around 20,000 meters, or 65,000 feet, above the ground in the stratosphere and above commercial airliners and most air traffic. The balloons will be used to beam the signal down to earth using LTE frequencies and according to information from Google, a single balloon can provide coverage for an area around 25 miles in diameter. Google has successfully tested Project Loon technology in California, Brazil and New Zealand and is currently conducting tests in Sri Lanka. For India, it had wanted to test the networking technology by broadcasting at the the lower frequencies (700 or 800 MHz), because the lower the frequency, the further the signal will go and the greater the coverage. However, the Indian government had appointed a panel under the IT secretary and asked BSNL (Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited, a state-owned telecommunications business) to provide the necessary infrastructure for Google’s testing. Unfortunately for Google, BSNL own spectrum is at the 2,500 MHz frequency point and not at the lower end of things.

The latest is that the Indian government has asked Google to select a carrier as a partner for the testing process and an official said this on the subject: “Google wants to test the Loon Project in expensive and scarce spectrum bands. It has been asked to partner with any telecom operator that can meet its requirement and then approach the government for testing Loon.” If Google wishes to test the technology with BSNL, it must use BSNL’s existing frequencies – which (currently) means adopting the higher frequency, 2,500 MHz, part of the spectrum. And one potential stumbling block is that India has yet to start an auction for spectrum at the 700 MHz frequency point, but it is expected to be the most expensive available. The Indian telecommunications regulator, Trai, has suggested that this spectrum will reach Rs 11,485 crore per MHz and that a carrier will be required to buy at least 5 MHz.

Google have improved the networking technology incorporated into the solar powered Project Loon balloons; compared with the initial specification, a single balloon now offers ten times the capacity. However, it is unclear how well the technology will work at the higher frequencies, which are better suited to short range capacity boosting rather than longer ranged blanket coverage, which the Loon balloons provide. It is possible that Google will need to wait for the up and coming 700 MHz spectrum before selecting a carrier partner, and then reapproaching the Indian government for testing approval.

Google, now Alphabet, is no stranger to working on projects which other companies might consider to be too far-fetched or fruitless to focus on. Although that has not stopped the company from proceeding with these less than orthodox projects. While some make it, some take considerable time in coming to fruition and some have extremely important implications, like for instance Project Loon. This is the company’s view of how they can connect the world further by making use of balloon technology to offer connectivity in remote parts of the world. An idea which not only could be game-changing in the grand scale of things, but one which is also quite likely to be fairly profitable as well.

However, it now seems as those one company is taking specific issue with Project Loon. The company is Space Data Corporation and their main issue is that they believe that Alphabet, albeit Google at the time, has effectively copied their idea. So much so that Space Data has now filed a complaint on the matter with the Northern California District Court against Google, Alphabet and X. The complaint focuses on two specific patent infringements that Space Data claims to have taken place. One revolves around the use of balloons as a route to providing connectivity, while the other focuses on “unmanned lighter-than-air safe termination and recovery methods.” Both patents do seem to be owned by Space Data and do seem to have been filed long before Project Loon came to be. Which is the basis of the Space Data’s complaint.

Interestingly, as The Verge reports, earlier reports dating as far back as 2008 do highlight that Google reps (including Sergey Brin and Larry Page) visited Space Data and were made privy to the balloon tech the company was (at the time) working on. The dates also do highlight that these meeting came before Project Loon came through. Which presumably Space Data is using as further evidence of Project Loon’s likeness to its own services, products and patented technology. At the moment, besides the actual filing of the complaint, there is little to further note on, although you can read the full details of the Space Data complaint by heading through the source link below.

Breakthrough paves the way for a reliable Internet service provided by balloons.

Google parent company Alphabet's ambitious Project Loon idea is one step closer to achieving its goal of delivering Internet to underserved areas via balloons.
In a Thursday blog post, Astro Teller, head of Alphabet's X team in charge of the company's moonshot projects, said the folks working on Project Loon recently had a "magical, serendipitous" discovery that pushed the initiative forward in a big way.
"They've now exceeded even their own expectations for how well their smart software algorithms can help their balloons navigate the globe, and in the process they've leapt much closer to a day when balloon-powered Internet could become a reality for people in rural and remote regions of the globe," he wrote.
The machine-learning-powered algorithms can now "send small teams of balloons to form a cluster over a specific region where people need Internet access." That's a departure from the team's original plan to create "rings of balloons" around the globe that would drift with the wind. The original idea was that as one balloon drifted out of range of a specific region, another would float along to take its place.
Now, the balloons can "dance on the winds in small loops to remain where needed," Teller explained.
There's several benefits to this approach.

"We'll be able to put together a Loon network over a particular region in weeks not months, and it would be a lot less work to launch and manage," Teller wrote. "We'll reduce the number of balloons we need and get greater value out of each one. All of this helps reduce the costs of operating a Loon-powered network."
But he cautioned: while this is a positive sign, there's still a lot of work to be done. The navigation algorithms still need improvement, and the Loon team needs to test them more extensively.